On the other hand, all I ever hear about hiring and degrees is that they don't care a whit about your actual education, since all that academic "theory" is supposedly crap anyway, right? All they want is proof that you can finish something. So people take that to heart and make courses like this, and then the people doing the hiring want to complain because we actually listened to them? People can't constantly go on about how worthless degrees are other than "for proving you can finish something" and then also complain when the bar for getting degrees is continually lowered so that all it indicates is whether or not you can finish something.
Your big problem is that you don't seem to be able to assess risk properly. You assign high values to the probability of unlikely events (were you the same guy who said Egypt was going to start WW3? If not you two have the same posting voice). You also overestimate the loss should this unlikely conflict arise.
On top of this, by your assessment the United States should divest itself entirely from the State of Israel, since that country has a history of many of the things that seem to bother you about, say, Egypt.
Our tradition of debate to settle matters would not work everywhere - when you have a number of deeply religious, radicalised members of a genocidal or theocratic party, there's very little you can say to them to get many of them to change their mind. Their ideas are not usually inconsistent - you're not going to poke holes in them. They're likely to not even listen to debates anyhow - they'll listen to their media and show up on ballot day but otherwise you won't even be able to engage them. They live in a different mental world than you do - different notions of justice, of how people should relate, different norms, and they watch different news.
Pretty concise description of the Republican party in the United States. I guess you're right, those people can't be trusted with democracy, look what a ruin they made of the US economy and all the death and torture they've spread around the world.
Still, I think I'll take freedom of speech over censorship any day. At the very least, it makes it easier to spot the evil ones.
If the muslim brotherhood gets control over the state of Egypt, world war III starts. It's that simple. And if Iran isn't contained soon, the same will happen.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The idea that Egypt could launch WW3 is insane. Saudi Arabia has gigantic resources (and was largely responsible for funding the Muslim Brotherhood everywhere it crops up) and yet WW3 has not started yet. I somehow doubt that the addition of Egypt would make that much of a difference either way. Keeping Egypt under a repressive regime in order to stave off an extremely unlikely scenario (Chinese invasion of the US via Mexico is more likely, for example, and it ISN'T likely at all) is exactly the kind of fearmongering thinking that got us into unwinnable conflicts in Iraq, and ruined our chance of doing anything worthwhile in Afghanistan when we had the chance.
Not only that, but if you make errors in observation or otherwise get the "wrong" data, the teacher will often just give you the "correct" data and tell you to use that to finish the lab. Its fucking pathetic.
Well the whole point is that they don't understand it, they don't want to understand it, and they don't want anyone else to understand it. They want their religion to have the same universal credability as science, but that can't happen as long as science is standing in the way. Many of these people, 600 years ago, would have been standing with a sword in their hand ready to plunge it into your chest cavity if you answered "Convert or die" incorrectly. Ultimately, religion is based on arbitrary bullshit that was invented by someone, and without total consensus agreement it quickly falls apart. When you base your cultural stability on everyone buying into the same bullshit, and people start to question, it creates danger for the power structure and for those who depend on that structure. These days, we have a working secular replacement that can hold together just fine without Religion, but the memetic momentum has carried the very idea of supernaturalist pap right into the current day, and will probably continue to carry it for a while to come. The coming worldwide disasters due to global warming will push many people back into religion's embrace, despite the fact that the whole reason they feel threatened (global warming) is yet another piece of evidence that their interventionist God does not exist.
I find there are a multitude of these already. My favorite is this: If an interventionist God exists and designed humans from the genetic level up, why do some babies self destruct when they get sick?
The very fact that SA would devote an entire issue to this subject speaks volumes for the profound amount of money putting out an issue on Darwin can be expected to make for Scientific American.
The creationist made claims involving notions of absolute truths, and the evolution side responded by saying, "No, science is the truth!".
No, actually, that isn't what science said. The pro-science camp (with the usual outliers of course) tends to say "What you're doing isn't science. Science is testable, your creationist nonsense is not, and thus doesn't belong in the science class." Its a nice straw man you've built, but it doesn't really hold up under any scrutiny.
As for "intelligent design," those people are just stupid. Why would an intelligent designer set up biological systems such that babies, when sick, tend to self destruct?
Some religions, like the LDS Church (Mormons), embrace all truth regardless of source and encourage critical thinking.
Made me wince. A vast majority of mormons embrace truth as long as it can reside in thier cultural comfort zone. A great example was the Church's stance on prop 8. Luckily the LDS church has shown a great amount of adaptability to changing cultural norms over the years, as the "prophets" convienently tend to get messages from God telling them to conform to modern mainstream thinking. Thus the end of polygamy in the church, the changes to the temple ceremony, and allowing black men to hold priesthood above aaronic. In fifty years you'll see gay Mormon couples happily holding hands as they walk out of the doors of the temple after their sealing.
- Intelligent leader balks when unknown element with no trust rating tries to assert power. Relents when he decides the new element has a positive benefit/cost ratio.
- Desperate survivors of a holocaust who mostly never saw combt before their homes and families were wiped out of existence by a superior military force and who are cut off from all normal supply lines and logistical support resort to improvised guerilla warfare and traditional asymetrical tactics, as were probably defined in one of their field manuals anyways. - Fighter Pilot from influential family with history of military and government service at the highest levels spontaneously goes Governor, then President of the most powerful country on the planet. Side note: Lee Adama isn't the only person, real or fictional, that has followed a stint in the military with a career that didn't mirror what they did in the service.
- Military unit's actions are strongly shaped by the personality and actions of their leader. Custer's men followed him to their deaths. The holocaust was perpetrated by men considered to be some of the finest, most elite soldiers alive. Other units of the german army were just regular people convinced they were protecting the interests of their homeland, and were not horrific war criminals.
Essentially, your points are crapshit and you just don't like the show.
I've thought a lot about this situation, and on reflection I think the way it went down was probably (as horrible as this sounds) a best-case. Nuclear weapon technology was coming. The soviets were going to have it eventually, we got to it first and we dropped the only two we had.
If we hadn't done that, imagine how many might have been mass produced by the WW2 industrial war machine. Now imagine a world where no example existed of how incredibly mind blowingly horrible these weapons are. Imagine an exchange of dozens or even hundreds of these weapons launched by clueless political idiots who had no idea what they were playing with.
Those victims in Japan are heroes on the stage of history. Their deaths, and the suffering of the survivors, is all that stood between the humanity and the long winter.
This is MIT we're talking about, shouldn't one of these clever kids have figured out how to chip their remote to sense when other people are answering a question and then have their remote send a randomly selected (or average of all other) response?
I find myself in the same boat. I want to like EVE, but for me the endless amounts of travel time to do anything in the game is a huge turnoff. Its the same reason I stopped playing Counter strike as well... too much time spent waiting to play, not enough time actually actively doing something (other than clicking "ok now warp me to the next waypoint so I can watch my ship slowly glide into the warp gate and do all this again 7 more times). And I know there are some kind of waypoint files you can get from people that speed that up, but the whole fact that you have to jump through hoops to do that kind of thing turns me off from the game. I hate travel time in an MMO, when I'm playing a game I want to be playing a game, and if I have to do all the traveling I want there to be something interesting to do while I'm doing so.
No, you see, we just use a bunch of carefully timed nuclear bombs to move the cable back and forth... oh and we change the elevator cable to a giant steel plate...
You missed the whole point. The idea is that the Galactica universe is very similar to our own, having many familiar things, but that it is at a fundamental level a different reality. The fashion is part of that, and is a little more complex than you make it out to be. Developing new technology is largely going to be independent of what the fashion world is doing.
Basically, the whole core of the show is that "all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again" and that is communicated in many many ways, the clothing being one of them.
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,
It is right there in the section you quoted, but because you don't like it your brain edits it out before whatever excuse for a frontal lobe you have can parse it. Justice. Domestic Tranquility. Promote the general welfare. I guess to you that means nothing at all. You're exactly the kind of ignorant little shit that likes to enjoy government benefits while they rail about how everyone else is enjoying government benefits. Selfish shits like you ruin the planet for the rest of us. Learn to think already. Do some research, figure out what makes a civilization work and what doesn't. If you really hate taxes so much, move to somewhere with one of those small government/no services/defense only philosophies and live it up. I hear Nigeria is quite nice this time of year, if you can find fresh water and don't get murdered that is.
We always have the solution of merely leveling the place.
Wait, didn't we invade Iraq to liberate the people from an evil dictator who was enslaving and killing them? So the solution is to obviously kill them indiscriminately, right?
Exactly! Thats why the French, the Germans, the Italians, and the Polish spend a vast majority of their national budgets on defense! God dude, you're fucking brilliant, you should be the SecDef!
Your failure to learn from mistakes is typical of people who share your ideological viewpoints. The intellectually bankrupt assertions you make have no factual content, yet you and your ilk endlessly repeat them because all you know how to do is exploit a flaw in human cognitive function that allows something repeated often enough to seem like truth. Obama will certainly not be the boon to terrorist recruiting that Bush was, and he seems to be intelligent enough to avoid the pitfalls of the Clinton administration that made him politically weak enough to not be able to effectively fight terrorists. Notice that the terrorists in India were looking to kill Americans and Brits. Who's occupying Iraq? Whose policy was it to occupy Iraq? Now that I've connected all the points for you and the conclusion is obvious, you can go back to wallowing in your own ignorance, gigglging and flinging your feces around while rubbing one out to your big-daddy leaders who tell you they're going to get the big bad wolf while they slip the money out of your wallet and into theirs. As for your "flatline spending on entitlements" line, you are either pig-ignorant or selfishly evil, as there are many people who paid into those systems in good faith and expect (rightly) to recieve the benefits they were promised. To put it in marketardspeak for you, imagine if you went to the burger shack and paid for a burger, fries, and a shake and they only gave you an unpeeled potato and told you to bootstrap yourself because they had to balance their budget.
Not that I expect this post to penetrate your haze-cloud of mental pollution or get through your shit-tinged goggles, but one can hope. Which, I guess, is what the Obama presidency is all about.
Is that 2.5 million income after expenditures? Running a farm is extremely expensive, and you can easily run through 2.5 million in seed, equipment upkeep, fertilizer, etc. If you like food, maybe complaining about farm subsidies isn't the right way to go...
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On the other hand, all I ever hear about hiring and degrees is that they don't care a whit about your actual education, since all that academic "theory" is supposedly crap anyway, right? All they want is proof that you can finish something. So people take that to heart and make courses like this, and then the people doing the hiring want to complain because we actually listened to them? People can't constantly go on about how worthless degrees are other than "for proving you can finish something" and then also complain when the bar for getting degrees is continually lowered so that all it indicates is whether or not you can finish something.
Your big problem is that you don't seem to be able to assess risk properly. You assign high values to the probability of unlikely events (were you the same guy who said Egypt was going to start WW3? If not you two have the same posting voice). You also overestimate the loss should this unlikely conflict arise.
On top of this, by your assessment the United States should divest itself entirely from the State of Israel, since that country has a history of many of the things that seem to bother you about, say, Egypt.
This thread brought out the stupids in force.
Just because you are a political party does NOT mean that you get to ignore existing laws.
Unless you're a Republican. Its ok if you're a Republican.
I had two Imams in my bedroom last night at the same time! Every guy's dream...
Our tradition of debate to settle matters would not work everywhere - when you have a number of deeply religious, radicalised members of a genocidal or theocratic party, there's very little you can say to them to get many of them to change their mind. Their ideas are not usually inconsistent - you're not going to poke holes in them. They're likely to not even listen to debates anyhow - they'll listen to their media and show up on ballot day but otherwise you won't even be able to engage them. They live in a different mental world than you do - different notions of justice, of how people should relate, different norms, and they watch different news.
Pretty concise description of the Republican party in the United States. I guess you're right, those people can't be trusted with democracy, look what a ruin they made of the US economy and all the death and torture they've spread around the world.
Still, I think I'll take freedom of speech over censorship any day. At the very least, it makes it easier to spot the evil ones.
If the muslim brotherhood gets control over the state of Egypt, world war III starts. It's that simple. And if Iran isn't contained soon, the same will happen.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The idea that Egypt could launch WW3 is insane. Saudi Arabia has gigantic resources (and was largely responsible for funding the Muslim Brotherhood everywhere it crops up) and yet WW3 has not started yet. I somehow doubt that the addition of Egypt would make that much of a difference either way. Keeping Egypt under a repressive regime in order to stave off an extremely unlikely scenario (Chinese invasion of the US via Mexico is more likely, for example, and it ISN'T likely at all) is exactly the kind of fearmongering thinking that got us into unwinnable conflicts in Iraq, and ruined our chance of doing anything worthwhile in Afghanistan when we had the chance.
Not only that, but if you make errors in observation or otherwise get the "wrong" data, the teacher will often just give you the "correct" data and tell you to use that to finish the lab. Its fucking pathetic.
Well the whole point is that they don't understand it, they don't want to understand it, and they don't want anyone else to understand it. They want their religion to have the same universal credability as science, but that can't happen as long as science is standing in the way. Many of these people, 600 years ago, would have been standing with a sword in their hand ready to plunge it into your chest cavity if you answered "Convert or die" incorrectly. Ultimately, religion is based on arbitrary bullshit that was invented by someone, and without total consensus agreement it quickly falls apart. When you base your cultural stability on everyone buying into the same bullshit, and people start to question, it creates danger for the power structure and for those who depend on that structure. These days, we have a working secular replacement that can hold together just fine without Religion, but the memetic momentum has carried the very idea of supernaturalist pap right into the current day, and will probably continue to carry it for a while to come. The coming worldwide disasters due to global warming will push many people back into religion's embrace, despite the fact that the whole reason they feel threatened (global warming) is yet another piece of evidence that their interventionist God does not exist.
I find there are a multitude of these already. My favorite is this: If an interventionist God exists and designed humans from the genetic level up, why do some babies self destruct when they get sick?
The very fact that SA would devote an entire issue to this subject speaks volumes for the profound amount of money putting out an issue on Darwin can be expected to make for Scientific American.
Fixed that for you.
The creationist made claims involving notions of absolute truths, and the evolution side responded by saying, "No, science is the truth!".
No, actually, that isn't what science said. The pro-science camp (with the usual outliers of course) tends to say "What you're doing isn't science. Science is testable, your creationist nonsense is not, and thus doesn't belong in the science class." Its a nice straw man you've built, but it doesn't really hold up under any scrutiny.
As for "intelligent design," those people are just stupid. Why would an intelligent designer set up biological systems such that babies, when sick, tend to self destruct?
As an ex mormon,
Some religions, like the LDS Church (Mormons), embrace all truth regardless of source and encourage critical thinking.
Made me wince. A vast majority of mormons embrace truth as long as it can reside in thier cultural comfort zone. A great example was the Church's stance on prop 8. Luckily the LDS church has shown a great amount of adaptability to changing cultural norms over the years, as the "prophets" convienently tend to get messages from God telling them to conform to modern mainstream thinking. Thus the end of polygamy in the church, the changes to the temple ceremony, and allowing black men to hold priesthood above aaronic. In fifty years you'll see gay Mormon couples happily holding hands as they walk out of the doors of the temple after their sealing.
Then we should sanction the corporations that hide behind the RIAA under order 66.
Ok I'll bite
- Intelligent leader balks when unknown element with no trust rating tries to assert power. Relents when he decides the new element has a positive benefit/cost ratio.
- Desperate survivors of a holocaust who mostly never saw combt before their homes and families were wiped out of existence by a superior military force and who are cut off from all normal supply lines and logistical support resort to improvised guerilla warfare and traditional asymetrical tactics, as were probably defined in one of their field manuals anyways.
- Fighter Pilot from influential family with history of military and government service at the highest levels spontaneously goes Governor, then President of the most powerful country on the planet. Side note: Lee Adama isn't the only person, real or fictional, that has followed a stint in the military with a career that didn't mirror what they did in the service.
- Military unit's actions are strongly shaped by the personality and actions of their leader. Custer's men followed him to their deaths. The holocaust was perpetrated by men considered to be some of the finest, most elite soldiers alive. Other units of the german army were just regular people convinced they were protecting the interests of their homeland, and were not horrific war criminals.
Essentially, your points are crapshit and you just don't like the show.
I've thought a lot about this situation, and on reflection I think the way it went down was probably (as horrible as this sounds) a best-case. Nuclear weapon technology was coming. The soviets were going to have it eventually, we got to it first and we dropped the only two we had.
If we hadn't done that, imagine how many might have been mass produced by the WW2 industrial war machine. Now imagine a world where no example existed of how incredibly mind blowingly horrible these weapons are. Imagine an exchange of dozens or even hundreds of these weapons launched by clueless political idiots who had no idea what they were playing with.
Those victims in Japan are heroes on the stage of history. Their deaths, and the suffering of the survivors, is all that stood between the humanity and the long winter.
Or at least, thats how I look at it.
This is MIT we're talking about, shouldn't one of these clever kids have figured out how to chip their remote to sense when other people are answering a question and then have their remote send a randomly selected (or average of all other) response?
I find myself in the same boat. I want to like EVE, but for me the endless amounts of travel time to do anything in the game is a huge turnoff. Its the same reason I stopped playing Counter strike as well... too much time spent waiting to play, not enough time actually actively doing something (other than clicking "ok now warp me to the next waypoint so I can watch my ship slowly glide into the warp gate and do all this again 7 more times). And I know there are some kind of waypoint files you can get from people that speed that up, but the whole fact that you have to jump through hoops to do that kind of thing turns me off from the game. I hate travel time in an MMO, when I'm playing a game I want to be playing a game, and if I have to do all the traveling I want there to be something interesting to do while I'm doing so.
No, you see, we just use a bunch of carefully timed nuclear bombs to move the cable back and forth... oh and we change the elevator cable to a giant steel plate...
You missed the whole point. The idea is that the Galactica universe is very similar to our own, having many familiar things, but that it is at a fundamental level a different reality. The fashion is part of that, and is a little more complex than you make it out to be. Developing new technology is largely going to be independent of what the fashion world is doing.
Basically, the whole core of the show is that "all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again" and that is communicated in many many ways, the clothing being one of them.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but that isn't really lobster...
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,
It is right there in the section you quoted, but because you don't like it your brain edits it out before whatever excuse for a frontal lobe you have can parse it. Justice. Domestic Tranquility. Promote the general welfare. I guess to you that means nothing at all. You're exactly the kind of ignorant little shit that likes to enjoy government benefits while they rail about how everyone else is enjoying government benefits. Selfish shits like you ruin the planet for the rest of us. Learn to think already. Do some research, figure out what makes a civilization work and what doesn't. If you really hate taxes so much, move to somewhere with one of those small government/no services/defense only philosophies and live it up. I hear Nigeria is quite nice this time of year, if you can find fresh water and don't get murdered that is.
We always have the solution of merely leveling the place.
Wait, didn't we invade Iraq to liberate the people from an evil dictator who was enslaving and killing them? So the solution is to obviously kill them indiscriminately, right?
Exactly! Thats why the French, the Germans, the Italians, and the Polish spend a vast majority of their national budgets on defense! God dude, you're fucking brilliant, you should be the SecDef!
Your failure to learn from mistakes is typical of people who share your ideological viewpoints. The intellectually bankrupt assertions you make have no factual content, yet you and your ilk endlessly repeat them because all you know how to do is exploit a flaw in human cognitive function that allows something repeated often enough to seem like truth. Obama will certainly not be the boon to terrorist recruiting that Bush was, and he seems to be intelligent enough to avoid the pitfalls of the Clinton administration that made him politically weak enough to not be able to effectively fight terrorists. Notice that the terrorists in India were looking to kill Americans and Brits. Who's occupying Iraq? Whose policy was it to occupy Iraq? Now that I've connected all the points for you and the conclusion is obvious, you can go back to wallowing in your own ignorance, gigglging and flinging your feces around while rubbing one out to your big-daddy leaders who tell you they're going to get the big bad wolf while they slip the money out of your wallet and into theirs. As for your "flatline spending on entitlements" line, you are either pig-ignorant or selfishly evil, as there are many people who paid into those systems in good faith and expect (rightly) to recieve the benefits they were promised. To put it in marketardspeak for you, imagine if you went to the burger shack and paid for a burger, fries, and a shake and they only gave you an unpeeled potato and told you to bootstrap yourself because they had to balance their budget.
Not that I expect this post to penetrate your haze-cloud of mental pollution or get through your shit-tinged goggles, but one can hope. Which, I guess, is what the Obama presidency is all about.
Is that 2.5 million income after expenditures? Running a farm is extremely expensive, and you can easily run through 2.5 million in seed, equipment upkeep, fertilizer, etc. If you like food, maybe complaining about farm subsidies isn't the right way to go...